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The whitepaper calls it an airdrop

Not quite. I believe they plan to take one or several "snapshots" of the STEEM blockchain and distribute tokens based on how much SP you hold. @appics announced a similar plan at Steem Fest.

Here is a post describing how this process might work.

https://steemit.com/token/@furion/giveaway-as-a-token-distribution-strategy

This would be a great strategy to bring existing SP holders into upcoming dapps using the new SMT protocol.